Today's downtime

[huggle]

My apologies for today's downtime. I had omitted to lock an old board which fell prey to a massive onslaught of spammers. more than 22,000 spam accounts had registered. I tried to delete these accounts using the board's admin control panel but it turned out to be too much for the poor server and it went into a sort of overload: I had used up all its memory.
It's fixed now: I deleted the spammers from the database which is faster (but riskier if you aren't good with SQL syntax)

It is possible that these morons try the same stunt again, therefore I'll lock the registration here and on Terran for a while.
If you invite people here, please let one of us Admins know. We'll then unlock the registration for the new member to register and lock it again after them.

[Lupine]

^Was it a Denial of Service attack? Or just generic spam?

[Jim Gamma]

22k accounts sounds like DoS to me.

[RJDiogenes]

Ah, you posted here, too. I've got to remember to click on "New Posts."

Yeah, 22,000 is an awful lot of spambots....

[huggle]

It was really just a spam orgy, not a DOS attack. Phoenix*, our server, can handle rather a lot of traffic. It would take millions of registrations within a minute to bring it down.

What caused the downtime was that I tried to delete the spammers on the board instead of editing the database manually. You know that from PCs: if you demand a very big operation from a programme, the computer will slow down and sometimes you can't tell if it froze or whether the operation takes really that long. Deleting that many posts, threads and users plus editing the forums and threads back to "last poster X, last topic Y at date Z" took very long. Mistakenly, I assumed the operation had frozen, I tried to restart the process repeatedly which then led to multiple deletion commands that confused the server and raised the memory use exponentially. So my fault, entirely, and basically a homemade DOS attack caused by my impatience. *blush*



* Lunarpages, who I host with, give all their servers astronomical names. Small ones get planet's names, larger ones get constellations' or galaxies' names. Phoenix is a medium-sized one but very fast.
17 years ago I started on Neptune, then the domain moved to Pluto, then iirc Andromeda and for the last 8 years we've been on Phoenix. TerranBBS, btw, used to be on Heze (aka Zeta Virginis)

[Lupine]

It was really just a spam orgy, not a DOS attack.

Pity. I was hoping we'd become some much of a threat that sinister forces were conspiring to take us down.

[huggle]

the Force is strong with us

[RJDiogenes]

We are in the Deep State on the Dark Web. Or at least a deep state of confusion.

17 years ago I started on Neptune, then the domain moved to Pluto,

I hope they didn't downgrade Pluto when the IAU did.

[huggle]

LOL naah, afaik they fiercely defend Pluto's status as planet #9 (as do I)

[RJDiogenes]

Excellent. Good for them.

[Orpheus]

Yeah, over the decades I've learned TOO many times: "PHP (or any application level language) is for unsurpassed convenience (but can take up to an hour on massive, unexpected/unoptimized tasks). Command line is for performance. Unsurpassed performance? Eff it: it'll take longer to write a program that will do it in 1 sec (with no slowdown) than to execute a well-constructed commandline that slows the server down for a minute or two.

You might think I'd have learned that first time I brought a server to its knees by using a board's built-in functions for a broad-scope task.

Well, you might think that if you didn't know ME... at all.

[RJDiogenes]

I imagine it was accompanied by a dramatic declaration of: "Today, the server-- tomorrow, THE WORLD!"

[emma glitch]

LOL naah, afaik they fiercely defend Pluto's status as planet #9 (as do I)

as do I as well.

[RJDiogenes]

Everybody should.